Design like music to your ears

The story

At the beginning of 2015, Stefanos Dorbarakis, a young and up-and-coming composer took a deep breath and decided to take the risk; write and release his first very own album. And so he wrote 11 orchestral songs, mixing classical and oriental traditional sounds, in which he collaborated with some of the most prominent Greek musicians. When everything was done, he went out to the graphic design market looking for an agency for the album’s name and artwork. And that’s where our paths crossed.

The name

Having spent hours and hours listening to Stefanos’s music, our mind went into a more tuneful mode and so we started developing names to reflect the album’s personality. After we presented and thoroughly explained our proposals, Stefanos decided to go for Greek name “lefko gramma”, which means “white letter”. The name’s underlying concept is that Stefanos’s orchestral music is, in a metaphorical sense, a representation of a letter that does not use any words; a letter that does, however, speak to our hearts. Because Stefanos’s notes really do speak louder than words.

The album design

When it came to designing the album’s cover, we decided that we wanted to incorporate the concept of “letter” into the artwork. Therefore, we thought of creating an envelope to enclose the album. To add an element of panache, we created a custom monogram seal stamp to seal the envelopes. For the album artwork, we worked together with musician and calligrapher Lefteris Havoutsas to handwrite the album’s name “lefko gramma”. We also guided him in writing a short piece of text - for the album’s cover and CD - using an unreadable handwriting style and squiggles over the last two words, to create a feeling of writing anxiety, a feeling of “I can’t say it in words”. Lastly, the generous use of whitespace across the layout design further communicates the concept of “white letter”.